Diamanda Galas

Dia­manda Galas makes music like nobody else. We talked to her before a per­for­mance of Defix­iones, a work about living in exile and for­got­ten geno­cide in the Near East that draws on every­thing from Lebanese poetry to Blind Lemon Jef­fer­son. Hardcore.

Whether you’re protest­ing about AIDS, or deal­ing with armen­ian his­tory, or what­ever, it seems like there’s only one theme there really, that you’re protest­ing, and you can’t help point­ing out injustice… is that right? that injus­tice is what all your work is about?

These are always inter­est­ing things for me to realise, also - you never really know why you become so intractably attracted to some­thing. To me it’s the same thing - I think, ‘Well I haven’t heard enough voices speak­ing about this, so I’d better say something.’ I’m like the one person in the crowd who says, ‘Everybody is saying this one fuck­ing thing, and nobody’s said this other thing, and what about this thing that needs to be said?’ I have a choice: I can go home and not say any­thing, and go home safely, or I can say it and have every­body call me a fuck­ing ass­hole. Well, I’ll pick the second one, because that allows me to go to sleep at night, where if I picked the first one, that would kill me, it would just kill me. That’s the posi­tion, and I’m not really sure why that’s been my way of approach­ing things, but that is def­i­nitely it.

And they are always sub­jects that people are unwill­ing to talk about…

These sub­jects are always kind of unpop­u­lar sub­jects. AIDS is a more pop­u­lar sub­ject now, because people are less afraid of it, or people in this part of the world are less afraid of it, because they think it’s gone away for some bizarre reason. Now this is a new thing that’s just hap­pened here, and the AIDS virus has gone away. Amer­i­cans need to be woken up, I mean noth­ing hor­ri­ble has hap­pened in Amer­ica for years. Really? What about all my friends who just died in the last twenty years? What about the United States of Aids and the trauma and the horror and the fact that we still have this virus? It’s amazing.

They’re very per­sonal con­cerns as well, though, with your brother or with your family history…

I’m not a fuck­ing pro­pa­gan­dist. If some­one used some­thing I’ve said on a poster I’d prob­a­bly be the first to faint. In dis­gust. My reac­tion to that would be, ‘Eugh, my God! You must have said some­thing really dis­hon­est for that fuck to put it on a poster!’ It just doesn’t swing that way, it isn’t that obvi­ous. I got com­plaints when I was first work­ing on Plague Mass, when I first came to new York, people were saying, ‘Hey, you’re singing this in like ten dif­fer­ent lan­guages, maybe you should do it all in English’ and I was like, ‘Oh right, only people who speak Eng­lish are get­ting this virus, how could I have not realised this?’ Or shit like, ‘Could you try to make your stuff a little more simple, so more people can under­stand it?’ No! The most impor­tant thing is that I know what the fuck I’m singing about, I’m not going to make it more fuck­ing simple so that you and Joe fuck­ing Blow over there can figure it out. If you can’t figure it out, that’s not my fuck­ing prob­lem, go listen to fuck­ing Melissa Etheridge.

So you’re not wor­ried about bal­anc­ing things so you get your mes­sage across?

No! I’m not get­ting paid to do this, I’m not some politi­cian. If that were my job, then yes I would con­sid­ered that, but then I’d have to con­sider many other forms of pros­ti­tu­tion, and I don’t have to do that.

So you don’t mind that your records are pretty innaccessible…

Nope, my cat­a­logue of work is really a lot more inac­ces­si­ble than my live per­for­mance because you’re only get­ting one dimen­sion. I just say to people, ‘Yeah, you can have a record, sure here’s a record!’

Right! And i guess one thing that makes them inna­ces­si­ble is your vocal style. How did that develop?

The vocal style? You know, Right now there are four dif­fer­ent records coming out. One is a re-​release of Panop­tica, one is Insecta, one is Defix­iones, and the other one is (erm) and there are a lot of dif­fer­ent vocal styles in there. A lot of the voice and piano stuff is very stark, very simple, very focussed on each word and drag­ging each word out and really artic­u­lat­ing. Then other pieces are multi-​tracked vocal stuff, or solo voice with ring mod­u­la­tion and quadra­phonic space… It all depends on what I’m trying to do, let’s say as an artist. If I was a painter, people would say that this is one series of work, or if I was Scorcese people would say this film has to do with hoods in New York, or this film has to do with Cape Fear. As a musi­cian people don’t like to under­stand that you have dif­fer­ent types of work. Clas­si­cal musi­cians can write works for sym­phony, works for quar­tet, works for elec­tron­ics. Venakis is a per­fect exam­ple, he did work for dig­i­tal elec­tronic pieces that scare the shit out of lots of people, then turn around and write a string quar­tet, and people would turn around and say, ‘So you’re only writ­ing string quar­tets now?’ and he’s turn around and say, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you, malaka (sp?), I write every­thing I hear.’ It’s not as if anyone would tell you that you can’t write an essay because you’re a poet… you see what I’m saying?

Yeah, dif­fer­ent styles are suited to dif­fer­ent aims… that makes me think: do you see your­self in a par­tic­u­lar tradition?

The iso­lated tra­di­tion of me! (laughs)

It’s just you?

Yeah! Really, I see myself in the tra­di­tion of… when you die, they finally get it! Like, many years after­wards. I realise that this is a prob­lem for many people in the music world. If you remain con­sis­tent to one way of work­ing, whether it’s just elec­tron­ics, or just voice and piano, they know how to sell it. When you don’t remain con­sis­tent, they don’t know how to sell it. So the only way around that is to be around so long that when some­one says your name, people have seen you per­form and know whether they want to see you per­form again. I don’t vol­un­teer con­sis­tency in my work, and I don’t have to because I have a record label that isn’t inter­ested in sell­ing records when it comes to me. I mean, they may be inter­ested in sell­ing Depeche Mode records, but they’re not inter­ested in sell­ing mine, they are inter­ested in putting them out.

So what inspires all this incon­sis­tency? You touch on gospel or jazz or clas­si­cal or what­ever — what is it that inspires these choices?

Well, here I am. I’m an Ana­to­lian Greek - a middle east­ern Greek - and I’m an Amer­i­can, which is a bloody weird com­bi­na­tion. That’s fuck­ing weird! It already says that I’m a Greek in the middle east, which means living under the influ­ence of the Turks as a slave to Islam, and that has a lot to do with Defix­iones. Then you have the Amer­i­can side, which is… I mean the finest music here that I know is from the south, whether it’s white coun­try blues, or black coun­try blues, it’s really pow­er­ful music. So I was raised with that, and with New Orleans music from my father’s band. You know, one of America’s most famous blues artists, Johnny Otis?

Yeah…

He was a Greek!

Honestly?

Yeah, I mean who knew? Nobody! The guy was walk­ing around in these pimp clothes for so many years, totally in the black com­mu­nity and thought of him­self as Greek and Black. He chose it, and was per­ceived as Black. I was in Prince­ton the other week, and the Greek depart­ment were think­ing of invit­ing him over for a fel­low­ship. I loved that, the idea of this guy rolling around in his pimp­mo­bile having a fuck­ing fellowship…

At Princeton!

Yeah! That I would have loved. So, yeah, that’s my com­bi­na­tion anyway, that’s where I’m coming form.

So, it’s a nat­ural result of all the music you grew up with…

Yeah, and the cul­ture. What it is to be Greek, what it is to be Middle East­ern, what it is to be American… and the singing comes nat­u­rally because I was raised that way, my father sang that way. I just know how to sing this way, but I also know how to sing the blues. And that com­bi­na­tion is really inter­est­ing: it enriches the blues to intro­duce the Middle East­ern scales. Or to RE-​introduce them, because oth­er­wise all we’re hear­ing is the same fuck­ing shit all the time from the pop music people, or even worse the jazz music people who are so fuck­ing con­ser­v­a­tive right now that they intro­duce all this crud that they think is new jazz singing or blues singing and it’s just the same fuck­ing scales, and it’s boring the shit out of the music…

Yeah, that’s the thing with jazz. It always goes on about being exper­i­men­tal, then gets stuck in a rut for, I don’t know, twenty years at a time…

Oh, yeah. And a lot of the pop singers. I’m lawyers talk­ing about this Mariah Carey school of singing. They all sound the same, they all always sing about being vic­tims, blah blah blah-​blah. The only one that I like is Brit­ney because she’s such a com­plete little per­vert. I love her, she’s not trying to be a singer, she’s so pro­duced and dis­torted that she sounds like some radioac­tive little animal. That’s why I like her, but then I would. I like her for all the wrong rea­sons, but that’s okay.

Right, can we talk a bit about Defix­iones? There’s the family con­nec­tion there, right? But what made you take it as your new over-​riding subject?

Well, you know what, you should go to my web­site. There’s three or four papers put in the web­site, because they explain the work very, very well and in terms of the present, of what just hap­pened her in new York. I think that when you’re coming out of a cul­ture like that — I heard these sto­ries from my father for years — that was dom­i­nated for many many years, and you see the death of your cul­ture through dis­in­ter­est and pow­er­ful inter­ests from out­side. Let’s say it’s like what we have now, with this liai­son between Amer­ica and Turkey, because of this war, they’re lean­ing on each other and always have, which means that who­ever has been screwed by turkey is going to con­tinue to be screwed by turkey in a big way. That’s Greece, Arme­nia, Cyprus, the Kurds… and the big powers aren’t going to give a fuck about them. That’s what the work is about in a way, the betrayal of these coun­tries by the large powers. But it’s such a long dis­cus­sion, it would prob­a­bly be better if you looked at the web­site, rather than have me bewil­der you with the his­tory of Arme­nia for three hours!

Okay, that leads me on to some­thing else I was going to ask: His­tory seems to play a big part in what you do. I mean in terms of echoes. Like you say, there’s cur­rent par­al­lels with Armenia’s past, then the work on AIDS, which seems to be very much a present con­cern, but you use texts form other eras…

You know what? I don’t do that inten­tion­ally. I must just be some sort of throw­back. I do do that, and I was look­ing at the Plague Mass the other day, and it could just as easily be about what hap­pened here the other day — I’m talk­ing about the Divine Pun­ish­ment — and it’s because of the lan­guage it’s spoken in. I’m not saying the work is time­less or some­thing because of that, or say any­thing about my work. It’s just in gen­eral I tend to like these very poetic texts. I just think that per­haps as a com­poser I’m attracted to texts that lend them­selves to a musi­cal, litur­gi­cal treat­ment. They have this swing, this incan­ta­tional qual­ity. I mean it’s rather than just open­ing the vil­lage voice and taking out some stock phrases and saying ‘President Bush is An Asshole!’ It’s like during the AIDS crisis there were all these pic­tures of Jesse Helms’ penis painted by sup­posed artists trying to make a state­ment. What’s the state­ment there? That his penis is two inches, three inches… what? I mean when people look at those paint­ings done by some idiot in ten years time they’ll just be like, ‘WHY? Where are you at, buddy? Were you trying to sell that? Why? Who bought it? Who cares?’ So, I don’t know, maybe it’s just impos­si­ble for me to see things at that localised, pedes­trian level. I don’t know why, I just find that impos­si­ble. If you look at Greek tragedy, say, it’s writ­ten in this lan­guage that is a larger ges­ture, it doesn’t try to get as par­lour room as pos­si­ble. I mean, talk­ing with my friends, I can get more than par­lour room, I can be as crass as you can imag­ine when it’s just a joke or just a con­ver­sa­tion. But not with my work, no. I’m not inter­ested in doing that.

So it’s pick­ing sources that will resonate…

Yeah. And that don’t bore me to death. I can’t read this other crap, it bores me. I look at it and just say, ‘Eugh’. So, yeah, that would be my defence. And there was no offence from you, but I still had a defence!

Going back to what you were saying about the dif­fer­ence between record­ings and performance… the per­for­mances are pretty full-​on, and you have this pretty strik­ing . Is that you? Or is that a planned way of get­ting your mes­sage across?

What exactly are you talk­ing about?

The visual side of things. You have this, you know, you have a cer­tain look…

Oh, well, that’s me as a per­former. If you look at a lot of clas­si­cal per­form­ers in the past, they would always have a look of some sort. When they were on stage they were per­form­ing and when they were off­stage they weren’t. And I don’t think they were trying any­thing other than what the mate­r­ial demanded. You know when you get off stage, you can look like a person who they would not allow into a liquor store, then when you go onstage it’s a trans­for­ma­tion. There really is a trans­for­ma­tion: your spine is straighter, your voice is dif­fer­ent, that’s what per­form­ing is, you put on your tuxedo and go, or what­ever it is men do… Off­stage, I am equal to any bag lady who ever hit the fuck­ing subway. You know, it’s not my job, and when it’s not my job it’s really not my job.

So you see your­self very much as a per­former as well as a musician?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Equally. Again, if you look at clas­si­cal musi­cians, Ruben­stein or some­one, they would never think of them­selves as one of the other. I mean, if you don’t know the fuck­ing music you’d better not get on the stage, and if you can’t per­form the music on stage you’d better not get on stage. Put it on a record and you can be Glenn Gould, but the music ends up suf­fer­ing because of that.

Right, so what’s coming up after Defixiones.

Well, I have all these records coming out. I haven’t been inter­ested in putting out records for quite some time, so they’re all coming out one after the other. I just became more inter­ested in per­form­ing all over the place and, aside from that, one does have to pay the rent, and I get paid a lot of money for per­form­ing and con­sid­er­ably less for sell­ing records. It’s totally dis­pro­por­tion­ate. In fact it’s prob­a­bly more dis­pro­por­tion­ate than anyone has ever known! I laugh about it, because I don’t really need to sell records.

So how do you feel about all these over the top descrip­tions attached to your per­for­mances? The Dark Diva and all that…

Well, that’s the nicest one I’ve ever heard! At least there’s some truth in it: I do per­form in dark­ness, I do have black hair, so, gee, it’s not com­pletely inaccurate… I have heard some pretty ridicu­lous ones, par­tic­u­larly in the British press. On in time out in par­tic­u­lar recently… boy, that guy had better be run­ning for his life if he sees me again. He’d better be fuck­ing run­ning, because he mis­quoted me, well, not even me, I was quot­ing Oscar Wilde, and he com­pletely mis­quoted me and Oscar Wilde. For this he is really going to eat shit! Actu­ally ,he really ate shit that night! He knows who he is, I won’t men­tion his name.

You’re making me ner­vous! Do you have a mis­trust for the press and the way they rep­re­sent you, then?

No. I have mis­trust for people who are triv­ial, and there are people who are triv­ial in every pro­fes­sion. People who choose to be triv­ial really are amaz­ing to me, and I don’t feel that it’s my job to under­stand them, but if I want to insult them on occa­sion, then I can just do it for sport and in defence of myself.

Posted at 11am on 15/01/01 by Jack Mottram to the interviews category.
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